7183Re: Spin-up maxtor onetouch

>
> --- In nslu2-general@yahoogroups.com, Mike Westerhof <mwester@> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue 26/02/08 12:02 AM , "David Shepherd" david@ sent:
> > [snip]
> > > If not ... while it seems "tidy" to be able to get the Onetouch to
> > > spindown (its mainly aimed at being a backup server which will
> > > eventually run rsnapshot once or twice a day to snapshot my main
> > > active NAS drive slo its not really in use much at the moment) is it
> > > really necessary to get the drive to spin down .... will it affect
> > > reliability much etc?
> >
> > Now that is *exactly* the correct question, IMO. Far too many
> people have wasted
> > far too much time, it seems to me, to try to get disks to spin down
> for no useful
> > reason.
> >
> > The bottom line is that a modern disk drive is designed to spin.
> There's no
> > appreciable wear caused by keeping it running. Modern drives are
> much better
> > about it, but in fact older hard drives were rather limited in terms
> of the
> > number of load/unload cycles they could tolerate.
>
> Thanks ... I think I'll forget about spin down and get on with doing
> more usefull things with the slug. It just seemed a bit "strange" that
> this HDD which is primarily intended to do rsnapshot backups of the
> main NAS device (a WD Netcenter) will be running 24/7 while the
> netcenter spins down after around 5 mins idle!
>

Dave,
I have a Maxtor One-Touch and a WD drive that both have built in
spin-down. One is running on an Unslung and the other on a Debian
slug. Both drives spin down OK. But, I must admit, it did take some
detective work to get the debian one to spin down, that was due to the
samba version used.
In my case, the Debian is a test slug, and is usually powered off. The
unslung one is on 24/7, it serves music and does automatic backups of
all active machines in my network each evening around 20:00. That
means if no one listens to any music, the disk needs to run for about
5 minutes a day. In my case I opted for the spin-down path, as opposed
to leaving it running all the time. I have no idea how much
electricity it really saves spinning down the drive
Depending upon the usage of the slug I think everyone needs to make
their own decision.